On the show last Saturday, Ed and I got a phone call from “Doug”, a volunteer driver who ended up spending most of the convention shuttling MSNBC people around the Cities.

And yow – what a phone call.  Ed has the audio from the phone call – it’s about six minutes.  Give it a listen.

Ed summarizes:

• According to Doug, MS-NBC apparently took no chances on questions from the crowd.  Rather than get caught with a question that might make Republicans look good, their producer pre-screened questioners, and Chris Matthews pretended it was random.
• Republicans were good tippers.  MS-NBC stiffed the drivers.
• Media people talked in the cars about how effective the Republican convention turned out to be, while publicly saying something else entirely.

Now, reading this bit here – which criticizes Ed’s piece (and, by extension I suppose, mine) on the subject – there are a few legitimate questions about this segment:

…much as I realize that MSNBC is now a left leaning network, mostly at night, this sort of “bottom of the barrel” type of scraping to find dirt on networks that don’t agree with your political ideologies is, quite frankly, childish and immature.

There was no “scraping”; Doug called us, unsolicited.  And

You think Fox News doesn’t pre-screen people on their network? Please. Don’t make me laugh.

I won’t make you laugh, but I might make you learn something, with any luck.

Of course Fox (and everyone else) screens people.  The objection is to screening to find people that precisely fit the narrative that’s already been written.
And finally:

Okay, first of all, were any precautions taken to ensure that this guy was not some sort of crank caller? I highly doubt this.

We – our producer Matt, in this case – did the usual phone screen.  It’s not impossible to think there was a crank.

So we’ll do what bloggers do; cast the question open to the legions of experts out there.

Were you a volunteer at the convention?  Were you in the audience on MSNBC?  What did you see?

My gut says the guy was on the level.  But what the heck; let’s shoot for confirmation.